Telecommunication systems, such as cellular networks or other wireless networks, use wireless signals to establish communication channels between various network devices. For example, an access node or “cell” may transmit a reference signal or a pilot signal over a signal radius and one or more wireless devices within the signal radius may attempt to establish a connection with the access node. Nowadays, many wireless devices are designed to perform tasks beyond voice communications and wireless networks must support multi-play applications of voice, video, and data on a single infrastructure and carry multi-play services that share radio access and core network resources. These converged services each have unique traffic-handling, Quality of Experience (QoE), and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.
In certain circumstances, a portion of the wireless network may experience a high load. For instance, an access node may become overloaded with, for example, large amounts of data traffic or too many wireless devices. When this happens, the network may take actions that help prevent a noticeable degradation in the QoE and QoS being provided to users. These actions can include “load balancing” which redistributes work among network elements and across frequency bands in order to help prevent degraded or lost service and implementation of various congestion management techniques.